Spreading The Love: Giving Away Comics Is Awesome. part 2

So, how did it go? Well, like most Halloweens up here, the weather is the real enemy. The 31st was really cold  and that hurt the overall turnout, so we still have a few issues left over, not a lot, but not everything was handed out. The response seemed pretty positive, we made little bags with a comic and a candy, so they got the best of both worlds. Overall, I liked it a lot, I will definitely do it again next year.

 

Sorry this simple post took so long to put up, I've been pretty deep into my next project, an anthology series that I'm heading up. I just got the rough pencils for my story this week, every thing's been moving really fast, I'll put up a more detailed post soon.

Spreading The Love: Giving Away Comics Is Awesome. part 1.

This past summer, the time had finally come for something I never thought I'd do. I sold some of my comics. Not a lot really, less than I wanted to, but we had a garage sale and a big section of it was some of my comics.

I noticed a kid looking through my random $1 box, he'd look at them, then go see what his parents were doing, then come back, then find them again, back and forth a few times. I knew he was really interested. I assume his parents were teaching some lesson about the importance and value of money because they really needed to be worn down in order to finally give this kid a dollar. As he looked through the box, judging each comic only by the covers, I could see myself digging through boxes when I was younger, no idea what I wanted until I saw it. I knew what needed to be done.

"Special sale right now, 4 for a dollar." When they all pulled away in their van, his mom said out the window that I made his day. That felt great but what felt even better was the fact that he had made my day too.

With my daughter now old enough to have a birthday party to go to at least once a month (or more, it feels like), my wife and I have unintentionally fallen into the habit of putting in a comic book with whatever else is being given as a gift. I don't know when it started, but it's been pretty consistent, an issue of Superman Family, old Tiny Titans back issues, the Green Lantern kid's series, boy or girl, everyone gets something.

So when I saw that you could get mini-comics just to give away at Halloween, I ordered big. After enjoying spreading comics through birthday presents and garage sales, I was really psyched to see what handing them out for Halloween felt like.

Sold in bundles of 20, I found a friend I could talk into splitting an order with me and for $15 each we got ten copies of six different books, hopefully something for everyone.

 

I also love the idea of handing out Basil Wolverton to the kids in my neighborhood.

 

 

No idea what the reaction will be, we'll have to save that for part 2.

Daddy, published early 2012

Some facts about my latest story 1). it's called 'Daddy' and was printed in the horror anthology Don't Be Afraid 2). The art was done by the talented Cecilia Latella, with a crazy deadline 3). My wife hates it.

After 'Glimmer' and the Tales From The Comics Experience came out, we went to work on the next anthology. I had a story ready to go and I set out to find an artist, after the third artist fell through, it looked like the production deadline was going to be out of reach for me. This was also at the time when my wife and I were expecting our first child, money was starting to be directed to places it had never needed to go before, suddenly making comics had to take a back seat. All of this led me to pull away from writing and focus on other things (keeping a baby alive), comics in general faded away a bit.

When the time finally came where I was confident in what I was doing as a parent and ready to start writing again I had already missed four other anthologies that Elevator Pitch Press had done, including their most successful series Great Zombies In History.  I contacted the group and found out the next book was going to be a book based around fear, fortunately for me, I was a new dad, I drove from the hospital 10 under the speed limit never taking my hands off the wheel, fear was one of my main emotions.

The story of the possibly possessed baby came as I was rocking my daughter to sleep. If you're not careful you can lose a few hours of your day just watching your kid sleep, I'm pretty sure I have, but this time was different. This was one of those times where you let your imagination run away on you, and you creep yourself out, like being home alone and putting the idea that someone is watching you outside, in to your own head. I sat and stared at her beautiful face and for no reason, imagined her opening her eyes and speaking with an adult voice to me. It creeped me out. I had a story.

My wife read the script and was also creeped out, not so much because the writing was so good, more because we had just had a baby and the story was about a father who hears his baby tell him to kill it. I assured her I was not following a popular piece of writing advice and  "writing what you know", she seemed reasonably convinced.

I approached DeviantART looking for an artist armed only with a killer deadline and a laughable page rate. To my surprise, a lot of people were interested, I looked through a number of galleries looking for the right look until I found Cecilia's page, her classic style was perfect.

Within only a few weeks I had a finished comic in my inbox. Once again I was officially a comic book writer.

Special thanks to my daughter Anna.

 

Support Cecilia's indiegogo campaign

 

The Fanboy vs. The Professional

-a brief thought of self doubt creeps in-

Clearly, the reason I'm here is to promote myself as a writer, a comic book writer specifically. The only reason I joined twitter or attempt to update a blog is to try and create some kind of professional presence and show some of the things I've written.

Apparently, Valiant Comics is mailing me a 1 in 100 variant cover edition of Archer & Armstrong #1. I won this by participating in a twitter based campaign where I send in a picture of myself, at my store, buying comics on Wednesday. I've also found myself having fun taking part in Valiant's fan art Friday contest, though my lack of artistic skill has kept me from winning that one yet. It was while I was thinking up the next thing I could try to enter in the fan art competition that I had the thought that maybe acting like a fanboy, takes away from trying to look like a professional.

It only takes listening to a few comic creator podcasts to realise that some of the people who read the least amount of comics, are the people that make them. It makes sense that writing or drawing a book professionally is going to be pretty time consuming, and that most of the excitement you can dig up is going to be focused on your own work, so can you be a writer and still be a fanboy? Valiant's relaunch has really grabbed my attention, I never read any of their old books, but I've now opened up a pull list at my store of only their current four titles. I'm hooked, I'm a fan, but can I send geeky Valiant tweets and draw little Valiant doodles while still hoping for a Valiant job?

Right now, I realise, I don't pay my bills by writing comic books, I suppose that might effect the way I look at this at the moment, but that's what I have to go with, me. It turns out "me" just wants to have fun, whatever that happens to mean at the time. I just want to take in what interests me and allow myself to get excited about stuff in a non-cool, non-professional way. I want a comic with a talking cover and contests that get me into my store on Wednesday, and I'm sorry that more companies aren't doing stuff like this. I would love to put a Valiant sticker on the back of my car, and I know that if I did, and I sent a picture to Valiant, they'd send me a comic to say "thanks". That's just awesome!

I guess the point is: The doubt creeped into my brain as I was drawing an exploding Bloodshot for the upcoming fan art Friday, it made me stop and think what I might look like to other people. Then I realised that I'm having a lot of fun with Valiant comics right now, and in the beginning, that was the only thing that I cared about in my comics, fun. The fun that made me want to write comics in the first place.

Maybe being a professional is being a fanboy.



****AFTER WRITING THIS****
Between me finishing this piece and actually posting it, the Friday Fan Art contest I entered has happened.
I didn't win, but interestingly, two participants in the fun were Shadowman artist Patrick Zircher and X-O Manowar writer Robert Venditti.

This was my piece:

The Blank Stare Into Space, aka Writing

Where.

It's true that most of my writing, maybe seventy percent, happens in my head. Sometimes I'll randomly write notes, but more often than not, I'll just stare into space working over story ideas in my head before writing them down. The idea part of the blank stare can happen anywhere, but the scripting part happens in the office, this is a breakdown of what I like to have in my work space to write.

I asked my wife to randomly come in and take a picture of me while I was writing, this is what she got:



booya

Pay no attention to the right side, none of that has anything to do with my writing, that's simply me updating my podcasts on a box of diapers, next to a Mexican wrestling mask. Although I have done some writing while wearing the mask, I don't think it was an essential piece in my process.

The real stuff is on the left:

1. This is my notebook. All ideas are gathered and broken into an overall story idea, then issue by issue breakdowns with some description and possibly a little dialogue. In the issue breakdowns I'll usually make little brackets indicating what action will be happening on one page, this helps me find the "page turn" moments I want to end on.

2. This is a sketchbook. I am, without a doubt, not an artist, the sketchbook comes in handy as a way to fidget and waste time without going on the internet and falling into the black hole of non-productivity. Sometimes just doodling some random shapes can be nice busy work while I think about the action or the dialogue. I also used to sketch out the page layouts as I was writing the script, just so I could see that what I was writing would actually look like a comic once it was drawn. I try not to do this anymore, instead leaving it in the hands of the artists.

3. This is my monthly list. This only came about in the last few months, I took it from Ryan K. Lindsay from The Process podcast. The list is nice because at the beginning of the month I make a new one, see what I have to carry over from last month, see what new stuff I have to add, and I get a good look at what I accomplished in the last 30 days. I'm not a full time professional writer, so some months I don't cross off a lot of stuff, but since I've started keeping track, I've always crossed off at least two things, more often three or four.

4. These are books I'm reading. I need to keep books close, these ones are, The Incal and Three Shadows, both are highly recommended reading.

5. These are comics. Similar to number 4, but different because these are regular sized monthly comics. For whatever reason, sometimes I just need to stop and pick one up, I just pick it up and flip through the stories that I've already read but push me forward and inspire me. Sometimes I just pick up a book and hold it, something about the size and shape of a comic, I don't know, If I'm stuck on something, It really does help to un-stick me. Maybe It just helps to see that it's worth it to keep writing because comics do get made, it happens, if this comic in my hand can be real, maybe my stuff can be too. These look like, Punk Rock Jesus and the Free Comic Book Day Donald Duck Family Comic, with Morrison's Supergods sitting on top of Secret Agent Poyo.

Glimmer, published early 2010

Unless you meet me personally, there's not much chance that you're going to see any of the stuff that I've written that has been published. Actually, even if you did meet me, I have very few physical copies of the comics I've worked on left. For this reason, I thought I'd go over the stuff I've written and post the whole thing up here. Might as well show somebody.

Glimmer began as a character in a pitch for a much larger story. I had zero experience behind the scenes in the world of comics, and for some reason, I thought my 16 issue superhero idea would be my best bet to get my foot in the door. After years of starts and stops, I finally decided I was going to try and pursue writing comics. I asked a friend attending art school if she knew anyone who liked doing comic work, that's how I met Scott Kowalchuk. His style blew my mind and I knew I wanted my ideas to look like his pages.

At this point I had enrolled in the first on-line version of the Comics Experience writing class with Andy Schmidt. The plan was to come up with a five page story that we would work on throughout the course, refining and updating as we went. Being knee deep in my superhero idea (that turns out, may have been too long for a first project) I tried to find a character with an interesting back story to dig up. I ended up finding Olivia.

Her back story was already written, my notes for the other idea had origins for all the characters, but Olivia was one that wasn't going to really get explored, she was a perfect candidate for this. I was happy with the story, it set up her character and showed off some of her powers, basically setting up nicely for an actual series to follow it. I suppose there's value in telling a one-shot story, but I went with more of an introduction to something bigger.

Around this point, Scott was beginning work on The Intrepids, but through sheer charm and possibly pity, I was able to get him to draw the finished story. I've always wished I could draw with some kind of competence, but I was never as jealous of someone's talent as I was when I saw Scott's pages coming in, bringing my story to life. To see a world I'd thought up in my mind, now in front of my eyes for the first time, crazy.

The other 12 people in the class also found artists and got their five page stories produced. We put them all together in a book and called it Tales From The Comics Experience. If you don't own a copy of the book right now, you may very well never own one (I do have a few left). Here's my story. Thanks Scott.

  

"This medium...this genre!"

As strange as it seems to me now as I'm writing this, I've never really thought about comics. I guess there had to be a time when I thought about the idea of buying and reading comic books and decided that they were awesome, and made them my preferred form of entertainment. I'm talking about comics as a medium, sequential pictures on a page coupled with captions and dialogue, telling a story, any story. On a recent episode of the Inkstuds podcast, Evan Dorkin raised the question of people loving comics, the medium, or just superheroes, the genre. He wondered, if DC closed down tomorrow, how many people would just be "done" with comics. The medium, or the genre? I think, for most of my life, it was the latter.

The first comic I remember owning was Crisis on Infinite Earths number 1, it's not the first comic I read, because I'm pretty sure, though I almost wore that book out looking at it, I never read it. I probably wouldn't have understood any of it anyway, I was pretty young. I guess all I needed was the pictures- they sucked me in and I've been a comic book fan ever since.

Well...

A superhero fan, I suppose would be more accurate, lots and lots of superheroes. This was back when I was living in a small town where, for the most part, comics were hard to find. In the 90s we had a comic store for a while, but they were pretty mainstream oriented. Once they closed down, it was only the corner store, which actually did sell comics back then. My early comic collecting was pretty sporadic and based primarily on how much money I could save and how often I was taken to a shop in the city. I didn't buy a ton of books, but that was fine because I read each one hundreds of times. The stuff I really remember is Star Wars (specifically the Empire Strikes Back adaptations), Robin, Iron Man, Hulk, Daredevil, and lots of Spider-Man. If the art wasn't a mainstream style, it looked funny, if it was black and white, I walked away, If there was no costumed hero running around saving the day, no thank you!

I have never stopped loving comics, or thought that they were "kid stuff" that I had out grown, I never looked down on comics, but I did burnout on them more than once. Whether it was financial or boredom or a bit of both, there have been many times that I stopped buying comics completely. Thinking back, they almost all happen the same way: 1) Buy a Wizard magazine(RIP) just to see what's been going on. 2) Buy an issue of the hot book they talk about, maybe a few back issues if something I missed sounds good. 3) Add a few titles, start getting caught up in a big crossover event. 4) Start worrying about stuff like, does this story "matter" and do I "have" to buy everything to get the whole story. 5) Answer "yes" to the last question and add 10 more books to my pull list. 6) Fall behind on reading my issues, realise I haven't read "________" in three months 7) Continue on like this for another month or so before breaking down and not buying comics at all. 8) Wait 3-6 months and repeat.

The good thing about all these burnouts is that every time I came back, I swore I wanted to break out of my old habits and try something new. I'd come back and read X-Statics because it looked so different, I'd come back and find stuff like Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, I'd come back and read The Tick or Scud, I'd find Bone or Love and Rockets. Suddenly, black and white was beautiful, art styles could vary all over the place, stories could be about real life, and you could swear in these fucking things. It wasn't about comics (or me) "growing up", it was just about my eyes opening wider to the medium as an actual medium, not just a genre.

Superhero comics are fantastic and I love them, I've spent most of my life filling long-boxes and book shelves with them. There is also a direct correlation between me feeling overwhelmed by my own hobby and how many superhero books I'm buying a month. That may sound crazy to you, but I assure you, it's very true for me. This genre has done a lot for me and I know I'll never leave it, (I can't wait to read Remender and Cassaday's Uncanny Avengers) but it's this medium that I love, now that I can see it for what it is; sequential pictures on a page coupled with captions and dialogue, telling a story, any story, without limits.

(some of the last comics i've read that i've really enjoyed)

Post, the first.

As a comic book writer, self promotion is key.
I have been told that I should increase my "web presence".

This is that, this is me doing that. Boom.